“To disagree with three fourths of all England on all points of view is one of the first elements of sanity.”

Oscar Wilde. 1882

“After all they were amateurs, and the ruling passion of my life was the detestation of the amateur. Combined with this was another perversity—an innate preference for the represented subject over the real one: the defect of the real one was so apt to be a lack of representation. I liked things that appeared; then one was sure. Whether they WERE or not was a subordinate and almost always a profitless question.”

1. “Some kinds of beings are Dasein: they constitute a world and a ‘being-there’ that is ‘ownmost,’ such that they say that the phenomena that are revealed to them are ‘their own,’ i.e. their own experiences. Some kinds of beings aren’t Dasein: no experiences there.” J.A. Miller. The Dasein/Non-Dasein Problem. 2009.

2a. “Truly the English, before any other vulgar language I know, is fit for both sorts. For, for the ancient, the Italian is so full of vowels that it must ever be cumbered with elisions; the Dutch so, of the other side, with consonants, that they cannot yield the sweet sliding fit for a verse. The French in his whole language has not one word that has his accent in the last syllable saving two, called antepenultima, and little more has the Spanish; and therefore very gracelessly may they use dactyls. The English is subject to none of these defects. Now for rime [rhythm—ed.], though we do not observe quantity, yet we observe the accent very precisely, which other languages either cannot do, or will not do so absolutely. That cæsura, or breathing-place in the midst of the verse, neither Italian nor Spanish have, the French and we never almost fail of.” Sir Philip Sidney. The Defense of Poesy. 1583.

2b. ” Oblivion shall not so trample on a son of the Muses, and such a son as they called their darling. Our nation are in his debt for a new English which he taught them. Euphues and his England began first that language. All our ladies were then his scholars, and that beauty in Court, which could not parley Euphuism, was as little regarded, as she which, now there, speaks not French.” Edward Blount sobre John Lyly. 1632.

* “Whatsoever looseth the grace, and clearenesse, converts into a Riddle; the obscurity is mark’d, but not the value. That perisheth,and is past by, like the Pearle in the Fable. Our style should be like skeine of silke to be carried, and found by the right thred, not ravel’d, and perplex’d; then all is a knot, a heape.” Ben Jonson. Timber or Discoveries. 1640

* “Feste. You have said, sir. To see this age! A sentence is but a cheveril glove to a good wit: how quickly the wrong side may be turned outward!

Viola. Nay, that’s certain; they that dally nicely with words may quickly make them wanton.” Shakespeare. Twelfth Night. 3.1.11. 1602

* “The idols imposed by words on the understanding are of two kinds: they are either names of things that do not exist (…), or they are names of things which exist, but yet confused and ill-defined, and hastily and irrregularly derived from realities.” Sir Francis Bacon. Novum Organum. 60. 1620

* “He was in logic a great critic,
Profoundly skill’d in analytic;
He could distinguish, and divide
A hair ‘twixt south, and south-west side:
On either which he would dispute,
Confute, change hands, and still confute,
He’d undertake to prove, by force
Of argument, a man’s no horse;
He’d prove a buzzard is no fowl,
And that a lord may be an owl,
A calf an alderman, a goose a justice,
And rooks Committee-men and Trustees.
He’d run in debt by disputation,
And pay with ratiocination.
All this by syllogism, true
In mood and figure, he would do.” Samuel Butler. Hudibras. I.I. 1663

*“And without naming them, I ask you if one of them does not perpetually pay us with clenches upon words and a certain clownish kind of raillery? if now and then he does not offer at a Catachresis or Clevelandism, wresting and torturing a word into another meaning […] But to do this always, and never be able to write a line without it, though it may be admired by some few Pedants, will not pass upon those who know that wit is best conveyed to us in the most easy language; and is most to be admired when a great thought comes dressed in words so commonly received that it is understood by the meanest apprehensions, as the best meat is the most easily digested: but we cannot read a verse of Cleveland’s without making a face at it, as if every word were a Pill to swallow: he gives us many times a hard Nut to break our Teeth, without a Kernel for our pains.” John Dryden. An Essay of Dramatic Poetry. 1668.

* Professor Butler’s first-prize sentence appears in “Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time,” an article in the scholarly journal Diacritics (1997):

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Dutton remarked that “it’s possibly the anxiety-inducing obscurity of such writing that has led Professor Warren Hedges of Southern Oregon University to praise Judith Butler as ‘probably one of the ten smartest people on the planet’.” Denis Dutton. Language Crimes: A Lesson in How Not to Write, Courtesy of the Professoriate. The Wall Street Journal, February 5, 1999. ( The Bad Writing Contest. Press Releases, 1996-1998)

3. “It is a misfortune, never entirely to be retrieved, that painting was not suffered to grow up among us, at the same time with poetry and the other arts and sciences” (Barry. 1773) Citado por Allan Cunnigham en The Lives of the Most EminentBritish Painters and Sculptors. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1846. Vol II. p 89.

“The opening stormy sea was populated with six blue-haired merman-like tritons. The gods Oceanus (“blue”) and Niger (black) entered, mounted upon giant seahorses. The twelve daughters of Niger, played by the Queen and her ladies in waiting, entered in the company of a dozen nymphs of Oceanus as torchbearers; the ladies of the Court were dressed in silver and azure, with pearls and feathers in their hair, while the torchbearers, in green doublets with gold puffed sleeves, had their faces, hands, and hair dyed blue. The ladies rode in a great hollow seashell, which seemed to float upon and move with the waves, and was accompanied by six large sea monsters carrying more torchbearers.” Michael Leapman. Inigo: The Troubled Life of Inigo Jones, Architect of the English Renaissance. London, Headline Book Publishing, 2003.

5. “Reynolds Opinion was that Genius May Be Taught & that all Pretence to Inspiration is a Lie & a Deceit to say the least of it”. William Blake. Marginal Notes to Reynolds´ Discourses. 1801-1809. En William Blake´s Writings. Vol II. Ed. G.E. Bentley, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978.

6. “There are many people who seem to have persuaded themselves, and are desirous of persuading others, that the arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture, are naturally and inevitably confined to particular ages: and further, that they are, like plants, only the growth of certain soils and climates. If all that they have advanced upon this head be admitted as true and decisive, it must be acknowledged that the people of the British dominions are laboring in the arts to little purpose.” James Barry. An Inquiry into the real and imaginary obstructions to the acquisition of the arts in England. London : printed for T. Becket, 1775. vii, [5, 227, [1 p. ; 22 cm. (8vo)

7. “They chuse to find out that the thing is impossible to us.” (Idem.)

8. William Hazlitt. Criticisms on Art and Sketches of the Picture Galleries of England. London: C. Templeman 1856

9. Martin Heidegger. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1953.

10.

a. Some have argued for an origin of Dasein in Chinese philosophy and Japanese philosophy: according to Tomonobu Imamichi, Heidegger’s concept of Dasein was inspired — although Heidegger remains silent on this — by Okakura Kakuzo’s concept of das-in-der-Welt-sein (being-in-the-worldness, worldliness) expressed in The Book of Tea to describe Zhuangzi’s philosophy, which Imamichi’s teacher had offered to Heidegger in 1919, after having followed lessons with him the year before. Tomonobu Imamichi, In Search of Wisdom. One Philosopher’s Journey, Tokyo, International House of Japan, 2004 (quoted by Anne Fagot-Largeau at her lesson at the College of France of 7 December 2006)

b. Heidegger’s dialectic of Dasein as man’s being-in-the-world and Being as such parallels the Atman -Brahman distinction: Brahman and Atman are the ground-words of the Indian tradition, not just words or concepts, but the very embodiment of that primordial unhiddenness in the light of which the Indian mind thenceforth breathed and thought, its very spiritual destiny. Not “metaphysics” which for Heidegger is concerned with the truth of beings (with beings as such or with the being of beings), but the inquiry into the truth of Being (Being itself or Being as such) would correspond with the paravidya, the higher knowledge, taught by the sage Angira to Saunaka. (Mehta, 1970, p. 305 ). Heideggerian Thinking and the Eastern Mind. Rolf von Eckartsberg and Ronald S. Valle. 1981

c. “Things think. That is, they gather to themselves the permanent and the transient of our world, the animate and the inanimate, the near and the remote, the sacred and the secular. These phenomena are manifest in whatever particular thing we pay heed toby tending and sparing it. If one studies Heidegger, as opposed to reading him only, and if one seeks to link this thought of his, that a thing gathers together the world, to his philosophy as a whole, I believe it will lose much of its outlandish character and possibly count in the end as a genuine insight.”Gray, J. Splendor of the simple. Philosophy East and West.1970

d. “The definition of Boethius still holds good: persona est rationalis naturae individua substantia, an individual substance of a rational nature. The true and unique human reality is therefore this particular human substance, this individual human being, which in the ordinary course of things is this person. To speak of ‘collective personality,’ or of a personality which would include other persons as parts, is to weave a concept from mutually contradictory notions. Indeed the members of such a collective personality could not themselves be persons, since a person must be independent of all other beings. Moreover consciousness naturally protests against the compenetration of my ego with another. We need not add that such a compenetration would mean the destruction of the freedom of the individual. Already we can see why scholastic moral and social philosophy emphasizes the value of individual personality, the psychological foundations of which are here laid down.” Maurice de Wulf. The Philosophical System of Thomas Aquinas. Harvard University Press: London. 1922

“Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME, that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, NATURE. In enumerating the values of nature and casting up their sum, I shall use the word in both senses; — in its common and in its philosophical import. In inquiries so general as our present one, the inaccuracy is not material; no confusion of thought will occur. Nature, in the common sense, refers to essences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf. Art is applied to the mixture of his will with the same things, as in a house, a canal, a statue, a picture. But his operations taken together are so insignificant, a little chipping, baking, patching, and washing, that in an impression so grand as that of the world on the human mind, they do not vary the result.” Ralph Waldo Emerson. Nature. Introduction. 1836

11. “I’ve not been cursed with talent, which could be a great inhibitor.” Douglas Sandberg. Remembering Robert Rauschenberg. 2008

“Andy had a kind of facility which I think drove him to develop and even invent ways to make his art so as not to be cursed by talented hand. His works are like monuments to his trying to free himself of his talent.” Rauschemberg sobre Warhol en “Edie: American Girl” Jean Stein, George Plimpton. 1982

“When movies were invented, their critics claimed there was one thing they couldn’t do: capture the soul, the distillation of personality. Ironically, this turned out to be one of film’s greatest capacities. Operated close up, the movie camera lets us read, perhaps more clearly than any other instrument, a subject’s emotions. As his hundreds of sixties, seventies, and eighties photo-silk-screen portraits attest, Warhol was compelled to portray the human face. The Bolex let him home in on flickering expressions and shifting nods, a near-instant raising and lowering of eyebrows, a quick sidelong glance, pensive and thoughtful slow noods, or a three-minute slide from composure into self-conscious giddiness–fleeting emotions that neither paint nor a still camera could capture. Andy’s ambition for the Screen Tests, as for film in general, was to register personality. Tony Scherman and David Dalton. Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol. 2009

“Barnett Newman “saw ‘Onement I’ as a breakthrough in his work. It features the first
full incarnation of what he later called a ‘zip’, a vertical band of color. This motif would
play a central role in many of his subsequent paintings. The painting’s title is an archaic
derivation of the word ‘atonement’, meaning, “the state of being made into one.” For
Newman, this unevenly painted zip on a flat field of color does not divide the canvas,
rather it merges both sides, drawing in the audience to intensely experience the work
both physically and emotionally. Some have compared the zips to Giacometti’s slender
figures, reinforcing Newman’s own connections between his paintings and the viewer’s
body.” Rachel Gershman. Barnett Newman. The Art Story Foundation.

12. “To whom, No subject, No Image, No taste, No object, No beauty, No message, No talent, No technique (no why), No idea, No intention, No art, No feeling”. Rosalind E. Krauss. October: the second decade, 1986-1996.

13. “I am doubtful of any talent, so whatever I choose to be, will be accomplished only by long study and work…” Jackson Pollock Art Quotes. Ed: Robert Genn

14. “Here is a painter who, almost single-handedly, carried the baton of Modernism across the Atlantic opening up a bleak mid-Twenties New York to new possibilities. André Breton described him as “the only painter in America” and de Kooning, when asked about his artistic origins, replied that they lay in 36 Union Square: the address of Gorky’s studio in Greenwich Village.” Arshile Gorky: an Old World newly minted. The Sunday Times. February 9, 2010

15. “The ‘origination and propagation of the (yBa) myth are firstly the responsibility of the contemporary arts establishment. The myth then becomes a feature of the mediation between the art world and a wider audience by the mass media.’

The yBa appeals to those who have made their money from pop and fashion precisely because such people are upwardly mobile and, along with the yBa, form part of a pincher (sic) attack on Europe aimed at re-establishing Anglo-American hegemony in culture.” Stewart Home. The Art of Chauvinism. En Disputations On Art, Anarchy And Assholism. Sabotage Editions, BM Senior: London. 1997

16. “The British Council has had good relationships with artists over the years, which is largely thanks to its curatorially rigorous teams. One early example was Lilian Somerville, who joined the British Council at the beginning of World War II and became director of the Fine Arts Department in 1949. According to Patrick Heron, writing in 1970, the year of Somerville’s retirement, she was responsible for its ‘enormously successful intervention in promoting British art overseas.

Today, this close relationship is nowhere better seen than at the Venice Biennale. The council’s involvement with the Biennale is perhaps the most visible and recognisable part of what the council’s visual arts section does. (Britain has been exhibiting at the Venice Biennale since 1895, but the exhibitions in the pavilion have been the responsibility of the council since 1938.) Exhibiting at the Biennale inevitably leads to an artist’s career growing internationally and, as a result, the council will receive increasing requests to show that artist. Simon Grant Cultural propaganda ? The British Council collection. 2009. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0PAL/is_564_169/ai_n31592555/?tag=content;col1

17. “The english character is formed by some complex of racial and historical forces. Moderated by the constant balm of England´s temperate climate [… The English predisposition to depict mundane, everyday scenes, full of humorous incident [… English painting favored imagination and poetry, beauty over truth, extravagance over restraint, the search for hidden meanings, the arousal of emotions and the telling of tales.” Julian Stallabrass. High Art Lite: British Art in the 1990s. The Bath Press: London 1999

19. “The English national character was now defined by that very preoccupation with painting as narrative, as rhetorical, the lack of which has defined it 200 years before” John Barrell. Sir Joshua Reynolds and the Englishness of English Art. en Nation and Narration ed. Homi K. Bhabha, Routlegde: London. 1990

20. “Thou say’st not only skill is gained

But genius too may be attained

By studious imitation;

Thy temper mild, thy genius fine

I’ll copy till I make them mine

By constant application.”

Thomas Bernard. Bishop of Killaloe

21. “Michael Howe, in Genius Explained suggests genius is not natural, but the result of hard work, perseverance and the stubbornness to struggle on where others give up. Fran Cottell, in her essay “The cult of the individual”, says “the idea perpetuated by the art market that individual geniuses arrive out of nowhere . . . is convenient but untrue. Artists invariably arrive at artistic solutions as a result of . . . social influences as well as for intellectual reasons.” Innate talent, the “fresh eye” that artists are supposed to have, has been debunked by Pierre Bourdieu in his 1996 book The Rules of Art , suggesting it is the result of early upbringing or training. Brigit Fowler paraphrases Bourdieu’s most challenging idea that “the whole history of Modernism has been one in which only those avant-garde artists who were centrally located and who had the time to spend on their experiments were the ones who won out.” The myth of genius. Eyemagazine #38 http://www.eyemagazine.com/feature.php?id=3&fid=25

22. “Instead of an aristocracy of wealth, of more harm and danger than benefit to society, to make an opening for the aristocracy of virtue and talent, which nature has wisely provided for the direction of the interests of society and scattered with equal hand through all its conditions, was deemed essential to a well-ordered republic.” Thomas Jefferson: Autobiography, 1821.

23. “I don’t try to drain all expression out, I just want a very neutral expression. If you have an extreme expression either laughing or crying or whatever then that’s the only content that you will get out of it. Whereas if its presented neutrally and flat-footedly, you can read whatever evidence is embedded in their visage, like laugh-lines and furrows or whatever, in the same way that you can make assumptions about people when you meet them at a cocktail party.

[… Well, Philip Glass said something that I thought was wonderful. He said that he is my haystacks! What he meant was that he is to me what haystacks were to Monet or, I would add, what bottles were to Morandi.

Are Monets paintings truly about haystacks? Are Morandis paintings truly about bottles? I don’t know. They’re paintings first, and the subject matter is there and you know something about it, but clearly it’s not essential that you have a meaningful relationship with a haystack or a bottle. Robert Ayers. Artinfo. The AI Interview. Chuck Close. Published March 7. 2006

“Here, now, is a maiden sister of his, my great-aunt Deborah, done by Kneller (es curioso anotar que en la adaptación de John Carlino, el nombre ¨Keller¨ es reemplazado por ¨Reynolds¨. The School for Scandal by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, adapted for contemporary audiences by Lewis John Carlino. Dramatist Play Service Inc. 2004) in his best manner and esteemed a very formidable likeness. There she is, you see, a shepherdess feeding her flock. You shall have her for five pounds ten—the sheep are worth the money.”

“Ay, ay, these are done in the true spirit of portrait-painting; no volontière grace or expression. Not like the works of your modern Raphaels, who give you the strongest resemblance, yet contrive to make your portrait independent of you; so that you may sink the original and not hurt the picture. No no; the merit of these is the inveterate likeness—all stiff and awkward as the originals, and like nothing in human nature besides.”

“I liked them– they were so simple; and I had no objection to them if
they would suit. But, somehow, with all their perfections I didn’t
easily believe in them. After all they were amateurs, and the ruling
passion of my life was the detestation of the amateur. Combined with
this was another perversity– an innate preference for the represented
subject over the real one: the defect of the real one was so apt to
be a lack of representation. I liked things that appeared; then one
was sure. Whether they WERE or not was a subordinate and almost
always a profitless question. There were other considerations, the
first of which was that I already had two or three people in use,
notably a young person with big feet, in alpaca, from Kilburn, who
for a couple of years had come to me regularly for my illustrations
and with whom I was still– perhaps ignobly– satisfied.” Henry James. The Real Thing. II. 1892

“I want paint to work as flesh… my portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not having a look of the sitter, being them … As far as I am concerned the paint is the person. I want it to work for me just as flesh does.”

“I see as a biologist. When I’m painting people in clothes I’m always thinking of naked people or animals dressed.”

“My preferred subject matter are humans.I’m really interested in them as animals,
and part of liking to work from them naked is partly for that reason.” Randall Wright. Lucian Freud. Painted Life. BBC. Sat 18 feb 2012

24. Andrew Neel. Alice Neel. SeeThink Productions. 2007

“We must go alone. Isolation must precede true society. I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching. How far off, how cool, how chaste the persons look, begirt each one with a precinct or sanctuary. So let us always sit. Why should we assume the faults of our friend, or wife, or father, or child, because they sit around our hearth, or are said to have the same blood? All men have my blood and I have all men’s. Not for that will I adopt their petulance or folly, even to the extent of being ashamed of it. But your isolation must not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is, must be elevation. At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles. Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closet door and say, ‘Come out unto us,’ — Do not spoil thy soul; do not all descend; keep thy state; stay at home in thine own heaven; come not for a moment into their facts, into their hubbub of conflicting appearances but let in the light of thy law on their confusion.” Emerson. Self-Reliance. 1842

25. “I don’t know if the truth that I have told will benefit the world in any way. I managed to do it at great cost to myself and perhaps to others. It is hard to go against the tide of one’s time, milieu, and position…” Neel. 1980

Whether I’m painting or not, I have this overweening interest in humanity. Even if I’m not working, I’m still analyzing people.

26. “If Dasein is “thrown” into cultural practices what becomes of human freedom?” Hubert Dreyfus. Heidegger and Foucault on the Subject, Agency and Practices. University of California, Berkeley. 2004

27. ‘There are two distinct styles … the grand, and the splendid or ornamental’, a distinction which emphasizes the element of sobriety which is intrinsic in the Grand Manner. ‘Intellectual dignity’ is the term Reynolds uses, and it is important to note that his advocacy of the Grand Manner is intended to elevate the position of the artist to beyond that of a ‘mere mechanick’.

“To achieve the Grand Manner, the subject should be grandiose, the treatment generalized, the concept intellectual, and the style unmannered. For Reynolds the Grand Manner requires subordination of the particular and emphasis on the generic ideal: ‘the whole beauty and grandeur of the art consists … in being able to get above all singular forms, local customs, particularities, and details of every kind.’ Thus costume and setting should be timeless which, in practice, invariably meant a generalized Antiquity. Vulgar or trivial subjects are to be avoided in favour of elevated, heroic themes with universal moral dimensions. Thus there arose a hierarchy of subjects, with history at the apex and still life and rustic genre at the base, which led, in particular, to the denigration of much Dutch and Flemish painting. “Success in the Grand Manner was rewarded by Academic advancement which, in turn, ensured commercial success. The style was therefore aspired to by such diverse artists as the animal painters Stubbs and Ward and the genre artists Bird and Haydon with deleterious and, in the latter’s case, tragic results.”

“What Camp taste responds to is “instant character” (this is, of course, very 18th century); and, conversely, what it is not stirred by is the sense of the development of character. Character is understood as a state of continual incandescence – a person being one, very intense thing. This attitude toward character is a key element of the theatricalization of experience embodied in the Camp sensibility. And it helps account for the fact that opera and ballet are experienced as such rich treasures of Camp, for neither of these forms can easily do justice to the complexity of human nature. Wherever there is development of character, Camp is reduced. Among operas, for example, La Traviata (which has some small development of character) is less campy than Il Trovatore (which has none).” Note 33.

“The pure examples of Camp are unintentional; they are dead serious. Note 19.

The hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance. Camp is a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers. Camp is the paintings of Carlo Crivelli, with their real jewels and trompe-l’oeil insects and cracks in the masonry. Camp is the outrageous aestheticism of Steinberg’s six American movies with Dietrich, all six, but especially the last, The Devil Is a Woman. . . . In Camp there is often something démesuré in the quality of the ambition, not only in the style of the work itself. Gaudí’s lurid and beautiful buildings in Barcelona are Camp not only because of their style but because they reveal — most notably in the Cathedral of the Sagrada Familia — the ambition on the part of one man to do what it takes a generation, a whole culture to accomplish.” Note 25. Susan Sontag. Notes on Camp. The Partisan Review. 31:4. Fall 1964.

29 “I’ve always been disturbed by the title of Jeff Koons’ series of works based on toys: “Celebration.” Was there ever a body of work less celebratory and more inert?”. Charlie Finch. Michael and Jeff

“At Auch, a member of the Jacobin Club explains that sans-culottisme does not consist in the smallness of one’s personal income, but in the sincere cult of equality’ that is, it is not an economic, but a moral category. […They were convinced that they were in the process of creating not only a new form of society, but also a new revolutionary man, virtuous, serious, patriotic. […Anyone who reads for the first time the minutes of local revolutionary clubs and other bodies will be surprised by the almost complete absence of political discussion and by the credulity displayed in accepting the official version of important political changes. […The revolutionaries were extremely naïve politically, they had an almost religious trust in their representatives and in the Convention. Their readiness to believe in even the most fantastic constructions of Fouquier-Tinville’s judicial imagination is to some extent explicable by the long series of myths and popular legends about `famine pacts’ and `foreign plots’. […it becomes more and more difficult to form a quorum large enough to carry on business, many `brothers’ only come when there is a scrutin épuratoire and once they have obtained a clean bill of revolutionary health, they go off with their certificat de civisme in their pocket and are seen no more. […The sans-culottes set too high a standard, their revolutionary man was too perfect to be true, and if from the purely human point of view there existed what might be called a revolutionary temperament, a factor quite as important in explaining the general comportment of the average sans-culotte as any political affiliations, such a temperament could not resist the pressure of time, boredom, fatigue, and laziness. Richard Cobb .The French and Their Revolution. The New Press. 1998

31. “Minute bubbles speckle the fur of a dead bullock, whose massive form is shot through with a fan of multi-colour tipped crossbow bolts, the inert body suspended in a container of formaldehyde. “Damien Hirst The Biopsy Paintings & Other N.P. James. http://www.artslant.com/ny/articles/show/3887

“The maggots mature into flies, feed off the cow head, fly to the other side of the tank and die. This literal representation of the complete lifecycle of a living organism is precisely what Hirst is interested in as an artist. He seeks to show the transitory nature of life and our own close relation with death.” http://www.brain-juice.com/cgi-bin/show_bio.cgi?p_id=117

“It is possible to argue then, that For the Love of God expresses the ambivalence of our relationship to death in contemporary culture. On the one hand it functions, in traditional terms, as a momento mori, reminding us that our lives are finite while, on the other hand, it speaks of the possibility that human ingenuity and artistry, backed by significant wealth, can not only prolong life but can preserve it indefinitely.” http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/section?content=a914246997&fulltext=713240928

The middles cleave to euphemisms not just because they’re an aid in avoiding facts. They like them also becacuse they assist their social yearnings toward pomposity. This is possible because most euphemisms permit the speaker to multiply syllables, and the middle class confuses sheer numerousness with weight and value.

Advertising diction feeds so smoothly into the middle-class psyche because of that class’s bent toward rhetorical fake elegance. Aspiring to ascend, it imagines that verbal grandeur will forward the process. Thus enormity, salutory, duplicity — and of course gourmet. “The theater still has a certain nicety to it,” says an actor in a TV interview. He means delicacy, but he also means that he’s middle-class and slavering to be upper. Paul Fussell. Class. 1983

32. David Cameron: “Our culture is second to none.”Cultural Capital Manifesto for the Future http://www.mla.gov.uk/news_and_views/press/releases/2010/~/media/Files/pdf/2010/news/Cultural_Capital_Manifesto January 2010

“We Britons had at that time particularly settled that it was treasonable to doubt our having and our being the best in everything.” Dickens. Great Expectations. 1861. Chapter 20.

33. “The idea of an “infantilist ethos” is as provocative and controversial as the idea of what Max Weber called the “protestant ethic”. Infantilization is at once both an elusive and a confrontational term, a potent metaphor that points on the one hand to the dumbing down of goods and shoppers in a postmodern global economy that seems to produce more goods than people need; and that points, on the other hand, to the targeting of children as consumers in a market where there are never enough shoppers. Once a staple of Freudian psychology focused on the psychopatology of regression, the term infantilization has in the last several years become a favorite of worrywart journalists: David Ansen fretting about the “widespread infantilization of pop culture”; Leon Wieseltier charging that “Hollywood is significantly responsible for the infantilization of America”, Philip Hensher of Britain´s The Independent sure that the “signs that adult culture is being infantilized everywhwre.” Benjamin R. Barber. Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole. W. W. Norton and Company. 2007

” The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature. How is a boy the master of society; independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests; he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him; he does not court you.” Emerson. Self’-Reliance.1841